Absence

When you die, you’d be surprised to know there’s a purgatory. We leave a World of poverty, war and rage to suddenly become part of a new World.

This World is very different to the one you were used to; in this one people are not savages, wars are rare and different races live together in a quasi-perfect state of harmony. It is a World of peace — but how can you know? You have no recollection of your life. Maybe you were a murderer, or a priest, or a warrior, or a slave, or maybe an aristocrat; all of that doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t matter to you because you get assigned a new role and you are born as a baby with no past history nor memory, from a woman. Not any woman, but a woman that you’ll call mother, who will love you from day one and who you’ll love after what they call “puberty”. This world is so different you’d be shocked by the contrast — if you remembered.

When you are growing up, they will tell you who God is; there will be teachings and lessons about His power, His accomplishments, His struggles. You’ll hear He’s a very wise man and that His gift is for us to have been born and lived. But you will also notice His absence. It is unbearable. Some say He talks to them in dreams; some believe He will come back anytime soon; some have no faith in Him ever coming back; some believe He left for a couple of minutes but His perception of time makes Him unaware of being away for so long. He made this World, and he used to live in it, but he left and everybody is still waiting for Him to come back. He used to organise everything and anything, and He would do public teachings where everybody will attend. But after he left people wanted to still hear His teachings so the wisest organised smaller congregations where they read them (or an interpretation of them.) This of course created some disputes about who is right and who is wrong — but that’s a story for another day.
All that matters is there’s great expectation and everybody is waiting impatiently for Him.

In this World, the Purgatory, you’ll spend some years: as a rule of thumb, the more deeds and sins you did in your life the more you’ll spend here and the more you’ll suffer. Some people deserve a horrible death after twenty or so years; some deserve a hundred years of which the last thirty they spend in pain and solitude; some were good, devote followers and in this life He rewards them with a very quick death, which also serves to punish their families with sadness and helplessness for their sins.

But how do we know we live in Purgatory? For you and everybody else this feels like life —real life—, and nobody can scientifically prove we had one before this one. And to try to explain or prove this religions were born, which in turn sparked wars, split religions into sects, which lead to more wars. Even some people dared to say there’s actually no God, that we’ve been lied to.
We are waiting for God to come back and reveal to us the truth, but until then we’ll have to conform with the teachings of our priests and religious leaders, who promise us that God exists and that there’s a previous life to this one — and that after we die —again— everything will become clear.